


Reprise

by Domenika Marzione (domarzione)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, Missing Scene, POV Peggy Carter, the defrosting of captain america
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-27
Updated: 2015-01-27
Packaged: 2018-03-09 08:23:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3242852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/domarzione/pseuds/Domenika%20Marzione
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nick showed up at nine and Peggy knew it was bad news because he showed up without dessert. (Sometimes the secrets kept between spymasters was that one of them had a sweet tooth and it wasn't her.) She still made tea because, despite more than sixty years in America, the British approach to trouble was still her default.</p><p>"We've found Captain Rogers."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reprise

**Author's Note:**

> You can consider this a prequel of sorts to the [Freezer Burn series](http://archiveofourown.org/series/38432) as there's nothing that contradicts it, but it's also compliant with the Cap movies, so take it either way. :)

"And how was your luncheon, Michael?" Peggy asked Agent Blakeny as he stood up, her coat folded over one arm. It was Tuesday and therefore her standing appointment for lunch with Betty, Rose, and Fannie, during which they pretended to be society ladies of a certain age and not a retired construction forewoman, a retired pilot, a doctor who still saw the occasional patient at ninety-one, and the former director of SHIELD. She rather thought they weren't fooling anyone - they laughed too loud, told too-crude jokes, and never quite remembered to be as helpless as four women over eighty-seven should be - but they kept it up regardless. It was fun and, at their ages, there was little reason to do anything that wasn't.

"Very good, ma'am," Agent Blakeny assured as he held out her coat for her to put on. She'd fought the notion of a permanent security detail, happy to lose the entourage she'd acquired during her directorship, but once she'd stopped feeling comfortable behind the wheel, she'd agreed to SHIELD-provided transportation and that had come with SHIELD-provided security as well because Nick played to win. "Had my first endive."

Blakeny knew better than to offer outright to help her walk, but he also knew that an offered arm on the stairs down to the street would not be turned down.

"Director Fury called, ma'am," he reported once they were situated in the town car brought around by Agent Martinez. "He asked if you were free this evening for a visit."

She smiled, both at the message and the means of its delivery; she turned her cell phone off in social situations and Nick thought to shame her out of the habit by calling people he knew were nearby. She suspected he knew it wouldn't work by this point, but it wasn't like either of them to concede defeat.

"I suppose I can clear my schedule," she replied. "Tell him I'll expect him."

She and Nick weren't friends, nor were they exactly mentor and protégé, but they'd built a respectful relationship after an early rough start during which he'd tried to pretend that he'd needed no help and she'd tried to guide SHIELD through him. There were very few people who understood what kind of weight the position carried and it helped to have someone who understood the burden. Her institutional memory mattered more than he'd like and his willingness to keep her a part of the intelligence world meant more than she'd wish, but it had become more than a business arrangement between them.

The next stop was across town to where the Brookings Institute kept a local office in one of the social clubs to be part of the peer review of a paper by one of the junior fellows. It had been a stultifyingly dull essay full of remarkable insight, which was how she planned to put it during the discussion. The fellow, a young woman she'd met a couple of times at Brookings functions, had the earnest self-esteem of a recent graduate who'd been assured at every step of the way of her uniqueness and value and intelligence. Somewhere along the line, secondary education had assumed the nurturing function of a montessori and Peggy considered it her duty to rub some of the waxy protective shine away so that the girl could develop a little backbone to go along with her obvious brilliance. In the long run, it made for a productive member of the intellectual class; in the short run, it would probably add to Peggy's tally of junior fellows she'd made cry.

Nick showed up at nine and Peggy knew it was bad news because he showed up without dessert. (Sometimes the secrets kept between spymasters was that one of them had a sweet tooth and it wasn't her.) She still made tea because, despite more than sixty years in America, the British approach to trouble was still her default.

"We've found Captain Rogers."

Peggy's first thought was that she was grateful he'd waited for her to sit down because otherwise she'd have been on the floor. Her second thought was _Steve_.

"Where?" she asked in a voice that sounded nothing like it should. She took a deep breath, amazed at the depth of feeling after all of this time. Relief, yes, but also grief overwhelming in its freshness. There were the pricks of incipient tears in her eyes and she willed them away; she'd cry over Steve -- she _had_ cried over Steve so many times over the years -- but not now.

"Permafrost northeast of Iceland," Nick answered, pulling a tablet out of his bag. As he fiddled with it, he told her a tale of a Stark Industries research site partially staffed with SHIELD agents searching for Captain America, of years of fruitless labors justified by one middle-of-the-night phone call and a photo of the shield trapped in ice.

"Do you want to see?" he asked. It wasn't meant as a challenge; the two of them were not beyond that but this wasn't the time for it. It was solicitous without being pitying and she appreciated that. Nick had grown up with the legacy of Captain America and the Howling Commandos, as every American boy born after the war had. But he'd also followed in their footsteps, after a fashion, and then enjoyed the friendship of Timothy Dugan and Gabriel Jones in their later years and so his connection to the Commandos was deeper and more immediate than most. He was vested in finding Steve -- and Bucky Barnes; he'd continued her own attempts to find any trace of Barnes's remains -- but he also knew how much Steve meant to her. Something she'd worked very hard to erase from history, not wanting either her home or professional life to be hobbled by her being The Girl Cap Left Behind.

She thought about the question for a moment. The Steve of her memories was young and handsome and _whole_ , smiling at her like she'd hung the moon or frowning as he worked over Commando mission plans with either Barnes or, later, Dugan. She wasn't sure she wanted to change that, to see what time and tide had done to his final suffering.

"It's surprisingly peaceful," Nick offered, a touch of what could be awe in his voice. "Captain Rogers's remains, as near as we can tell, are intact. We're still bringing up the equipment to exhume him, but the through-ice radar images indicate as much."

She didn't speak, only nodded, and he slid the tablet over to her. The image on the screen was not of Steve, but of the environment, the wing tip of the _Valkyrie_ the only feature in a landscape that might as well have been the moon. She paged through the photos, more of the surface, of the hole they'd drilled down, of the interior of the _Valkyrie_. It wasn't as badly damaged as she'd imagined in her nightmares, but the pilot's chair had been destroyed by the impact and _that_ broke her heart anew because it was where Steve would have been, thrown backward by the force of the collision.

The next picture was of the shield trapped under the ice, beautiful and forbidding, and she paused, looking up.

"You said Stark Industries is involved," she prompted. She couldn't imagine what was going on there. Tony was still busy dismantling Howard's legacy as a weaponeer, but it was just the latest attack on the world his father had created. Howard's involvement in the search for Captain America had been the first, abruptly defunded once Tony had taken over SI in '91. It had been a spiteful act, hardly a budgetary necessity, and Tony had gasconaded in the face of public dismay like the preening young man he'd been. And still was, despite the heavy toll the years had taken.

(She'd washed her hands of him then, leaving him to Stane, and maybe one day they'd both apologize to each other for what they'd done out of pique.)

The search for Steve hadn't been restarted until Nick had pulled together enough cash and favors a few years ago. She hadn't realized there'd been any SI involvement at all.

"They're funding most of it," Nick replied with a wry expression; the two men had a friction-filled history and he'd take any victory over Tony as sweet. "Turns out I have a little more pull at the Pentagon than he thought, which mattered a lot more when SI was a defense industry concern and not a 'green energy pioneer.' Just as well we found Cap before he yanked the funding again; I don't have time to curry favor with the blowhard hypocrites in Davos."

She smiled. "I don't think Virginia Potts has the same motivations as her predecessor."

She'd never met Miss Potts, but everything she'd read and heard impressed her. Including how desperately so many were trying to paint her as a whore who'd only gotten where she was because she had the affection of a powerful man. Familiar argument, that, old as time. Or at least 1946.

Nick shrugged, possibly in agreement but mostly in disinterest. He was a results man, not as interested in the journey.

"Virginia Potts is probably the only reason we're getting anything done," he admitted. "Stark wasn't answering anyone's calls on the matter until she got back. He's still not answering anyone's calls, but at least he's sending an email or two. We're getting what we need to do this properly."

She made a noise of... approval? agreement? relief? She didn't know. Her eyes were on the photo of the shield in the ice, gleaming from the refracted light so that it shone like a beacon.

With a deep breath, she swiped her finger along the screen, paging it forward. The next few shots were of the shield, but then there was one that at first she thought must have been included by accident because it was just ice, but then she tilted the screen a little and saw the shadow of an outline.

 _Steve_.

She closed her eyes because this time, the tears did fall. She didn't weep, just brushed them away with the back of her hand.

"There'll be a state funeral with all of the trimmings," Nick went on, doing her the favor of pretending not to notice her tears. "We're still figuring out how to move him and when we go public. Ellis wants it as soon as possible and he wants cameras meeting a coffin at Dover, but that means doing a lot more work up there than either our people or Stark's people are comfortable with. It also assumes that we're going to bury Captain Rogers at Arlington."

Peggy opened her eyes. She didn't misunderstand what Nick hadn't said. Steve had signed away his body to posthumous research before he'd even stepped into Erskine's machine, but even if he hadn't, the chance that the genetic material of the world's only super-soldier could fall into the wrong hands was too great to take the chance of even the most well-guarded public grave.

"So let Ellis get his picture taken saluting an empty coffin," she said with asperity. "It's election season, after all, and the man's got a position of power to defend from challengers."

Nick gave her a severe look undercut by his own amusement. He knew she was no fan of Ellis, the first president to not invite her to the White House since she'd become Director of SHIELD. Ellis had campaigned last time on how America needed to 'reset' its foreign policy and forget the Cold War and its lessons as if they had not shaped the very fabric of the world they lived in. Peggy had been a part of the history he'd wanted to forget, another Cold War relic, and she was surprised at how angry she was that now he'd get to enjoy the benefits of Steve's return.

"We won't let him get away with too much," Nick assured. "He's the President and he'll get more reflected glory than we'd wish, but we can push back a little. I was thinking we might ask Alex Pierce to serve as master of ceremonies for the funeral. Ellis won't pick that fight and Pierce will do right by Captain Rogers."

She nodded; it would be a savvy move. Pierce had always insisted he'd never be interested in being president, but nobody had ever quite believed that a man who loved power as much as he did would really stick to 'never' if the opportunity arose. The primaries were still months away; it wasn't too late. And Ellis would be more than aware of that.

Nick's cell phone started chirping and he looked over at it before sighing, picking up, and barking "What?"

The what was some crisis incipient enough to justify Nick traveling back down to DC to keep it from growing larger. 

"I'll keep you updated on everything we're doing," he promised as he stood. "And if you want to be there when we bring him home, I'll make that happen."

She saw him to the door and then stood in her living room, unable to decide whether to return to her tea in the kitchen or sit on the couch and cry. Tea won out, barely. 

Over the next week, there were several messages from Nick -- and it was always him, never an assistant or his secretary -- about what they were planning, sometimes even forwarded messages from the team at the Stark Research Site and one repellent one from the White House. The scientists, both SI and SHIELD, eventually won the day and Steve was brought home still encased in ice ("like a salmon") because shipping all of the necessary equipment up to the Arctic was incredibly complicated and expensive and not all of it _could_ be transported and some of it could be transported but couldn't be used safely. Peggy was relieved, not just because it was the right thing to do for Steve, but also because it gave Nick and his people a head start in finding Steve's actual secure resting place that would not be the empty grave in Arlington. 

It was a week of strange dreams and distracted days, of tears and laughter at odd moments, and trying very hard not to tell her friends her news or explain to anyone why she was acting so peculiarly. At the end of it, she went up to New Hampshire, to a SHIELD facility on the books as a ichthyology laboratory but actually a forensics unit, to have a chance to bid Steve a final goodbye. She hadn't wanted to be there for the final work, the removal of the last layers of ice, and so she arrived as it was being completed. 

Just from what had been done before the transportation, she already knew that Steve's body was, in fact, intact and surprisingly undamaged. But not completely so. There was already evidence of his injuries even without being able to do a physical exam, including skull fractures that had the forensic pathologists suggesting that Steve had died on impact of a massive brain injury and would not have suffered. Peggy rather thought that was meant to soothe rather than enlighten, but she was too keyed up to be either. 

There had been no blood in the ice that melted away; the water that had filled the cockpit had washed him clean and left him floating supine to be frozen in a natural resting pose. Like he'd died in bed instead of through violence. The photos -- she'd grudgingly looked at them when Nick had handed her the tablet -- were extremely distressing even though Steve looked to be at peace. He looked _dead_ , blueish and pale, and his expression was slack in a way it never had been when he'd been alive. She'd given the tablet back without finishing the slideshow and went off to sit by the window to compose herself and prepare for seeing the reality that the photos could not encompass.

It was where she was still sitting when a woman in blue surgical scrubs came tearing into the room. "Director!" 

Peggy turned and stopped herself from replying just in time. 

Nick had seen it anyway and smiled as he asked what the matter was. 

"It's Captain Rogers, sir," the woman replied, sounding flustered. "He's _alive_." 

The next few hours passed in a haze, in an instant, in a year, in chaos, in silence, in shouts. She wasn't the only one who'd needed the story repeated more than once because it was too fantastical to make sense. But she was the only one who'd had doctors surreptitiously checking to see if the shock would kill her until she'd sharply convinced them otherwise. 

_Steve was alive._

At the moment, it was a technicality. Steve was less alive than 'not dead.' His core body temperature was impossibly low, his heartbeat impossibly slow, and they were still bringing in equipment because this was a morgue and not an emergency room. They had no idea if he would ever regain consciousness or what he might be like if he did -- nobody knew what decades in ice had done to his muscles, let alone his brain or eyes or nervous system. 

"It explains the lack of severe injuries," Doctor Weissman told them. "He's been slowly healing the entire time." 

Which meant that the skull fractures were deceptively minor, most likely. The original head wound had been as traumatic as might be expected from such a high-velocity collision, but the bones had been slowly knitting for sixty-six years. What the brain had been doing during that time, nobody could tell, at least not yet and maybe not ever. 

She left one of the impromptu meetings, ostensibly to visit the lavatory but mostly to get a moment of quiet away from the discussions of Steve's flesh as if it were not part of a whole person, as if there was no _Steve_ and just a Captain America-shaped mass of cells. As if he had been dead as he'd supposed to have been. Part of her understood the disassociation - nobody in the room apart from her had ever met the man, had ever understood that there'd even been a _Steve_ beyond Captain America, let alone a mind and a soul to go along with the superbly engineered flesh. But the rest of her was disturbed and disgusted and appalled and had needed to get away. 

She found herself walking toward where Steve was being kept and went in. There was a young woman sitting next to the table where Steve was lying -- there were no beds, nothing suitable for his needs -- and she jumped up when Peggy entered. She'd been playing a game on her phone, not working, and probably there just in case Steve suddenly woke up or one of the many monitors he was attached to started giving off alarms. 

"Relax," Peggy told her. "I'm hardly likely to harm him. The urge passed sometime in 1945."

The young woman smiled. "I'll give you some privacy, Madam Director," she said and made sure Peggy was seated before going out. 

She could do nothing but watch Steve at first, too overwhelmed to do more than sit and breathe and look at a face she had known she'd never see again outside of a photograph. And yet here he was. 

"You contrary man," she whispered. "This is really the tops."

He had been stripped of his uniform and was covered from sternum down by wool blankets atop a space blanket, the result of conflicting opinions about how quickly they should be warming his body. There was a bathtub of sorts for when they thought they'd be thawing a corpse, but the doctors were still in the room with Fury arguing with each other about what to do next now that the job was salvation and not preservation. In the meanwhile, his exposed skin was covered in electrodes, pale and still a little blueish and a waxy cast to it that made him seem less real than he had even when he'd first stepped out of the vita-ray machine glistening and transformed. His forehead, when she placed her hand on it, was unnervingly cool, but not ice cold. He had not frozen solid, they had said. His hair had grown out some, although not hardly seventy years' worth, and up close the blond stubble was more noticeable. He was still lax in his expression, too still to be asleep. He was breathing, shallowly and irregularly, little sips of air, and they'd run a cannula into his nose and mouth to give him extra oxygen. He looked so young, so impossibly young, and so vulnerable and she felt tears come again. 

She looked for the lump of blanket that would be his right hand and reached underneath the covers for it. It was cold, colder than his forehead, and she could feel fingernails longer than Steve would have ever let them get, but the roughness of it was comforting and familiar in a way that surprised her. Once upon a time, she'd have been able to tell someone what his hands had been like, the shape of them, the calluses from pistol and pencil, the strength restrained in them. But sixty-six years was a long time and she'd lived a life (and a half), she'd touched and been touched by others, in kindness and in anger. But it was nice, she decided, to touch a piece of her past she remembered only fondly now, the sadness and wistfulness washed away decades ago. 

He wasn't in pain, they were quite certain, and had likely never been in pain. She hoped that remained true, however long he lived and in whatever state. 

Nick came and found her eventually, giving her a look for having wandered off without a warning. "They're going to transfer him to the black hospital in Portland," he said. The black hospital was really an old house in the East End secured and converted into a well-provisioned clinic, a place for clandestine agents injured abroad to come for care. "It's close and they can do more for him than leave him on a morgue table under an army blanket. Once we get an idea of what his outlook is, we'll figure out the next step."

A black hospital could handle a long-term patient and, Nick didn't need to say, there was a chance that Steve might never leave once he'd arrived. 

"Do you want to go with him?" Nick asked when she only nodded acceptance. 

She thought about it for a moment. "No," she replied. "When we've figured out Steve's next step, I'll figure out mine."

Nick didn't miss the 'we,' she was sure. There was little to be gained by going up to Portland right now, to sit on tenterhooks waiting for tests that would only distress her and results that might break her heart anew. She had a life to live, still, and responsibilities to meet, and she could be fretful at home just as easily. 

They flew down to Philadelphia together, a journey companionable in its silence; she read more think tank papers and he caught up in the business of running SHIELD that could not be delegated. 

The news from Portland was generally good but vague: Steve was physically recuperating at a rate that astonished, but while his body was returning to normal function, nobody knew anything about his mind. The brain was a mystery and while there was no physical damage, he remained comatose and they could not say if that would ever change. At least until a week later, when they could, sheepishly and with great joy, say that they thought he might indeed wake up and it would be soon. They were going to transfer him to the New York headquarters on Wednesday, which had advanced care facilities should they be required, among other advantages. Nick promised Peggy that she could travel up to see him whenever she wanted once he was situated. 

She begged off her next Tuesday lunch date in anticipation of doing just that. 

Sunday evening, Nick turned up unexpectedly on her doorstep with cannolis and a strange expression. She led him directly to the kitchen and put up water for tea.

"Watch this," he said, giving her his tablet and then going over to the cabinet where he knew the dessert plates were stored. "Don't ask about the shoes. I don't know why there are shoes."

It was a video she at first thought was a movie or television show, one of the many Captain America dramas still being made. But then she saw Steve and not an actor and realized that this was the room SHIELD had set up to ease Steve's shock should he wake up in full possession of his faculties. "If we put him in Medical, he's going to think he got abducted by aliens," Nick had pointed out when she'd questioned the ruse. 

It turned out that aliens weren't who Steve thought he'd gotten abducted by when he awoke very much in possession of his faculties. And his reflexes. And the shoes she wasn't supposed to ask about. 

Her first reaction was to cry with joy at seeing Steve animated and alert and _alive_ after everything that had gone on the last month, to hear his voice once more. The second was to laugh and that was the one she gave into, much to Nick's dismay.

"For the record," she said once she'd gotten control of her mirth, "it wasn't just the baseball game. Your agent's period costume is anachronistic in certain noticeable areas."

Steve had been with the USO and the chorus girls and the movie stars for a long time and was attuned to certain details above and beyond what any red-blooded young man would notice about the opposite sex; he'd have taken one look at the young lady's hair and cleavage and realized something was off. 

"Yeah, well," Nick muttered, poking through the bakery box's contents for a chocolate-covered cannoli. "Next time we'll be more careful."

Steve had been corralled in Times Square, Nick explained, but then he paused and put down the last bit of cannoli. "He said he'd missed a date."

Tears came out of nowhere, even as she laughed. "He did, the ruddy bastard."

Nick gave her a moment.

"I told him it wasn't too late to make it up and he was… relieved," he went on with a little bit of care. "But I'm not sure he's ready for it to be right away. The shock is hitting him pretty hard right now. He's letting us run our tests, but… It's post-traumatic stress, nothing we shouldn't have expected, although considering the situation it wasn't one of the outcomes we'd prioritized. Regardless, I may have to rescind my offer to you until he's ready."

It hurt to agree, deeply so, but it was the only possible response. 

Nick filled her in on what else was going on, from Ellis's disappointment in not being able to use Steve as a campaign prop to how Tony Stark had readily agreed to bury all of the details to keep them from getting out to what Steve's options were once he'd acclimated to the idea of being in the future. Nick wanted to know her opinions of how SHIELD might facilitate that process with everything from lessons on Twentieth Century history to how computers worked and she promised to do whatever needed doing there. It didn't ease the pain of this new separation from Steve, a wound not as deep as the one from 1945 but more acute for its freshness, but it was something, a little bit of protection she could offer from a distance. 

As Nick made to leave, she made one request. "Ask him, would you, if I might send him a letter." A letter, on paper and not in an email, might be easier for the both of them. She hadn't really considered how hard seeing him might be for herself, too happy to have the opportunity at all. But now that there would be time and space, she could take her own care into consideration as well. "When he's ready."

Nick agreed. 

It was a Tuesday afternoon when Agent Blakeny was waiting for her in the entrance of the restaurant with her coat and a message. "Director Fury said 'write away.'"

**Author's Note:**

> I spend a lot of time on [Tumblr](http://laporcupina.tumblr.com/) now, if you're into that sort of thing.


End file.
